Last week someone replied to one of my posts with a link.
I had written that the city fixes things and tells no one, that the moment you report a problem you are in the dark. He shared a City of Toronto deck and said: “this answers your question, they do not have the capability yet”.
He was right. It does answer the question. So I read all twelve pages.
Credit first, because I mean it
As of April, Parks service requests carry staff-written status notes. A status lookup with a reference number is in testing. The people inside the city doing this work are trying, inside a system that makes trying slow.
I am not here to dunk on them. I am here to say the place they are walking toward is a place I already live.
What the deck is
It is called “Simplifying the 311 Intake Experience.” Service Excellence Committee, May 14th, 2026. Public.
Two initiatives. A front-end redesign: a clean, mobile-first homepage to find, submit, and track a request, with AI to help you find the right one. And what they call “Closing the Loop”: status milestones, proactive notifications, photos of the work, clearer outcomes.
Read those two sentences again. That is SolveTO. And “closing the loop” is the exact phrase I have used for months.
Their plan, page by page, next to what already exists
| Toronto city’s plan (May 14 deck) | City target | SolveTO |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile-first homepage to find, submit, track | end of 2026 to Q3 2027 | Live since February 2026 |
| Simplified, public-facing categories | Q3 2026 to Q1 2027 | The AI picks the category from your photo or your voice. Live |
| Improved search | Q3 2027 | Reference-number lookup is live. Full search, not yet, and I will say so |
| AI chat assistance | Q4 2026 | I built it. I paused it to stay lean. I can switch it back on |
| Strategic approach: phased rollout, user research, usability testing | ongoing to 2027 | Done. Shipped, tested with real residents, iterated in public |
| Closing the loop: milestones, notifications, outcomes | Q4 2027, division by division | Status and reference tracking are live. The “the city says it is resolved” step, I am building now |
| Photo on the report | Q3 to Q4 2026 | Live since launch |
| Status lookup: reference number, map, milestones | in testing | Live. Track any report by reference number |
| Across departments | by Q4 2027, one division at a time | 11 departments, 2 cities. Never one at a time |
Their strategic approach is a phased rollout with user research and usability testing. I already did that. Phase one is not a future state for me. It shipped in February, in public, tested by real residents, fixed the same week when a report showed me what was broken.
The tech is ordinary. The city is still years behind.
SolveTO went live in February 2026. The AI behind it is nothing rare. The tools to read a photo and write a report have been on the shelf, available to anyone, for years. I am not a research lab. I picked up what was already there and shipped it, working alone at night.
The city is only now, in 2026, putting “introduce AI” on a roadmap that runs to 2027. Same shelf. Same tools. Years apart.
The technology was never the gap. The gap is who moves.
And this is a plan, not a thing you can use
A plan. I have shipped enough to know the difference.
Plans at this scale slip. A 2027 date in a 2026 deck is a 2028 date waiting to happen, or it gets reorganized, rescoped, or dropped the moment the budget turns. Residents have complained about 311 for years. The pace has a track record, and the track record is slow.
So I read “by Q4 2027” and I do not read a promise. I read a hope, written by a committee, for a thing that already runs today.
This is a pattern, not a one-off
In March, council moved to study putting AI cameras on city trucks to spot potholes automatically, and to study building a public map of reports, repair status, and timelines. Reports due in 2027.
I built that map in February. I wrote about that meeting here: every meeting, every motion, every vote.
The city keeps choosing the study over the solution. Meanwhile there are Canadian builders, local teams, who could stand this up faster and cheaper, right now. If residents asking for exactly this, me included, helped nudge the redesign along, good. That is the system working. I do not need the credit. I need the loop closed.
The number you are paying for
Twelve pages. Timelines, service codes, percentages, a roadmap that runs to 2027. One number is missing, and it is the one that comes out of your pocket.
What does this cost. How many staff. How many years. How many tax dollars to rebuild, by 2027, a thing that already runs in 2026 and costs the public nothing.
The deck does not say. A plan this size, in front of a committee, with no price on it. You are funding it, and you have not been told what it costs.
So ask. Ask your councillor what the 311 redesign costs and how many people are on it. Ask why the city is paying to build from scratch what residents already use for free. You may not get a clean answer. That is reason enough to keep asking.
The offer, and I am serious
You do not have to build the front end. It exists. Residents already use it.
SolveTO can be the front door, the part the public touches, today. The city builds one thing: a back end that pulls the reports from SolveTO into your systems. That is a fraction of the work in this deck, and it skips the years.
This does not replace 311. It becomes its fastest front door, and every report still lands in the city’s own systems.
Free for residents. The reports flow to the city the moment they are filed. You add whatever you need behind it. Want the AI chat, I will switch it on. Want search, I will build it. Ask me.
This is not for the city as an institution that has to follow a roadmap. It is for the resident who reports a pothole tonight and wants the city to know about it tonight, not in 2027.
So do something with this
If you live here, you are not a bystander in this. Try it tonight at solveto.ca. Then send your councillor one line: this already exists, why are we paying to build it again. That sentence, from enough people, moves faster than any roadmap.
If you write about the city, the story is sitting in the open. A public deck, a 2027 date, and a working version that shipped in February. The questions write themselves. What does it cost. Why the wait. Why rebuild what residents already use.
If you run a campus, a hospital, a business district, anything with land and people on it, you do not have to wait for the city at all. The same tool is one boundary away.
I wrote that Canada sits at number 47 on the world’s civic ranking because the gap is architecture, not resources. This deck is that sentence, in twelve pages.
The city wrote a plan for 2027. You can use the thing tonight. The only question left is how long we agree to wait.
